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Most books on genocide consider it primarily as a twentieth century phenomenon. In The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide, Mark Levene argues that this approach fails to grasp its true origins. Genocide developed out of modernity and the striving for the nation-state, both essentially Western experiences. It was European expansion into all hemispheres between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries that provided the main stimulus to its pre-1914 manifestations.One critical outcome, on the cusp of modernity, was the French revolutionary destruction of the Vendée. Levene finishes this volume at the 1914 watershed with the destabilising effects of the 'rise of the West' on older Ottoman, Chinese, Russian and Austrian empires, with devastating consequences for peoples such as the Armenians, and the East European Jews. The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide is the second volume in Levene's sweeping four-volume survey, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State.

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This books central thesis is that genocide is a product of the West. On the surface this looks clear. The west invented the word genocide to define what it had done to people like the Jews. But since then it has been clear that the first genocide of the twentieth century was actually in the Ottoman empire, against the Armenians. Subsequent genocides have taken place in Cambodia and Rwanda and in Sudan. The author points to the eradication of native people and colonialism as part and parcel to the idea of genocide. But genocide existed long before in many settings. Many people's have been compeltely destroyed and massacred in history. The way in which Rome subdued Carthage is a typical example. The Carthaginians were all sold into slavery and the women raped. A similar process took place in Arabia with the birth of Islam. Genocide is as old as humanity itself. The argument that modern technology makes genocide easier does not hold much water. The Rwandan genocide was carried out with machetes. The only thing the Nazis perfected was an efficient and 'clean' genocide. But in human history many small groups have been destroyed by neighboring ones. THe Bible is replete with such stories.